Back in May this year, in an interview that appeared in Legal Week, I was prepared to hedge my bets as to whether a tipping point in the use of electronic discovery methods had been reached. Now I am convinced.
The reason is the timely conjunction of market need, technical capacity and tumbling costs.
To illustrate how far e-discovery costs have fallen, we estimate that a large e-discovery project undertaken five years ago which took upwards of six months and cost more than £500,000 would today be completed within days and cost less than £10,000.
There are four key factors at work here – cost pressure from clients; increasing maturation of e-discovery technology; a judiciary increasingly aware of e-discovery and prepared to address costs; and competitive pressure as the more innovative law firms leverage the technology for competitive advantage.
A key benefit of these technical improvements and increased speed is that the latest e-discovery technology is available to any law firm of any size on any matter, at a price that will be proportionate to the claim. We are now at the point where it should be normal practice to use e-discovery technology in relation to even relatively low value disputes. The question for those practitioners who have been slow to embrace the new paradigm is, “How much longer can you afford not to?”
Further reading: e-Discovery in the Spotlight